Policing Black Lives

tags

Police

Notes

ON STATE VIOLENCE AND BLACK LIVES

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The state is imagined by many to be the protector of its national subjects. But this belief is a fiction

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the state protects some at the expense of others. The purpose of state violence is to maintain the order that is “in part defined in terms of particular systems of stratification that determine the distribution of resources and power”

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the state protects some at the expense of others. The purpose of state violence is to maintain the order that is “in part defined in terms of particular systems of stratification that determine the distribution of resources and power”

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harms inflicted by state actors are rarely prosecuted as criminal, even when the actions involve extreme violence, theft and loss of life

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Europeans had to erase and repress the hundreds of years of contact between the ancient West and North Africa

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despite the abolition of the slave trade worldwide, the transition from slavery to freedom did not substantially change the meanings that had become inextricably associated with Blackness

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despite the abolition of the slave trade worldwide, the transition from slavery to freedom did not substantially change the meanings that had become inextricably associated with Blackness

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Black and white Canadians appear to commit relatively equal levels of most crimes

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Because many forms of overt racism are not tolerated, state-sanctioned violence relies on the blameworthiness of those whom it harms

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Canada’s Black population has been excluded from those seen as “national subjects”

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It should not be seen as less violent when the police harm a Black youth who is, in technical terms, “criminal,”

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DEVALUING BLACK LIFE, DEMONIZING BLACK BODIES

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Slavery was practised in Canada for over two hundred years

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slavery never took the form of the large-scale plantations found in the American South, the Caribbean or South America. Plantations, though their establishment was desired by some colonists, were found to be incompatible with Canada’s climate and short growing season (Mackey 2010). As a result, the number of enslaved people in Canada was always lower

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In New France, the buying and selling of Black men, women and children and the non-consensual unpaid labour extracted from approximately four thousand Indigenous and Black enslaved people

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Though slavery was not practised in all households, it was nonetheless seen as a normal, natural facet of settler colonial society

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In New France, though, Indigenous persons made up two-thirds of the slave population

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life conditions of slaves held by the French settlers were markedly inhumane

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After France’s defeat in the Seven Years War with Britain in 1763, the Treaty of Paris sur rendered French control of its Canadian colonies to Britain. For enslaved Black people, this did not signify any liberation. Slave ownership was given official approval by England and all existing owners retained the rights to their human chattel

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the smaller size of the enslaved population meant a level of white surveillance that was possibly more extreme than in plantation societies

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simplistic liberation nar rative based on the freedom granted to some enslaved American Blacks

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the British did not liberate Black enslaved people out of benevolence, but as a political manoeuvre designed to steal rebel “property”

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though thousands of freed Blacks migrated to pre- Confederation Canada after the Revolutionary War, thousands more enslaved Blacks ar rived into Nova Scotia as the property of white Loyalist slaveholders and settlers

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Some enslaved Black peoples actually escaped pre- Confederation Canada to seek freedom in the Northern states

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Few freed Blacks received the land that they had been promised by the British Crown, and those who did received one-quarter of that allotted to white Loyalists ar riving at the same time — an amount of land that was too little for subsistence

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egal freedom of people of African descent [in Nova Scotia] usually went hand-in-hand with social and economic marginality so acute that it almost represented a sur rogate for slavery

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Slavery was officially abolished across the British Empire in 1834. In the preceding decades, the practice had been declining, as numerous judicial decisions slowly stripped it of its legality — for example, no new enslaved people could be brought into some parts of Canada after 1793

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Canada’s history as a white-dominated, Anglo- Saxon state was not a natural evolution but required careful, indeed brutal, engineering

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After his re-election in 1878, Prime Minister John A. Macdonald orchestrated a state-sanctioned famine for Indigenous communities in the Prairies. The hunger, sickness and death that followed this planned starvation allowed for a forced relocation onto and confinement within reserves

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Act of Union of 1840 legally endorsed the concept of separate schooling. This endorsement informally blocked Black children’s access to schools in Canada West

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not just spatially separated from white schools, but also intended to provide an inferior education. They were both underfunded and unequally resourced. Some Black schools were not just underfunded, but were entirely abandoned by the state

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The last segregated school in Canada closed in 1983

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white settlers in Canada were offered 160 acres of free farmlands

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medical examiners were paid a government bonus for each Black migrant that they turned away

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The department went as far as paying Black American doctors to go to Oklahoma and Kansas to convince would- be Black migrants that the Canadian climate was dangerous

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The official, publicized government position did not explicitly prohibit Black migration; it tended to focus on “climate.”

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Immigration agents informed steamship companies that they were not to sell tickets to African- Caribbean peoples.

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a historical analysis of media and public opinion at the time found that Canadians were staunchly opposed to Black migration, yet refused to think this racist

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racism could be avoided to the extent that Black people were kept out of the country

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ARRESTED (IN)JUSTICE

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WHILE SLAVERY WAS OFFICIALLY ABOLISHED ALMOST two centuries ago, Canada’s legacy of exerting control over Black bodies was reconsolidated, perhaps most strongly, in the criminal justice system

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Defenders of the status quo have argued that Blacks are not unjustly profiled, policed and incarcerated because of their race, but because they are, in fact, more likely to break the law than whites

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The imposition of forcing Indigenous persons onto reserves and then, beginning in 1846, residential schools, were the initial modes of confinement levelled at Indigenous persons

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“criminal control” remains an integral part of conquest

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the course material for the first year of police college in one Montréal institution taught students that Blacks commit more crimes than whites and are more prone to violence

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Margaret Wente defended the practice of racially focused policing

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police “go where crime occurs. We go where the community calls us to go”

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data demonstrating enormous disproportions in police stops

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“Crime” itself is not a neutral category

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activities deemed criminal are both common and evenly distributed across race and class

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Most people who commit crimes do not go to jail. It is not, after all, breaking the law which renders one a criminal — it is being caught, arrested and convicted

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The enormous discretion granted to law enforcement in where to seek out crime and to determine who seems suspicious plays a significant role in who becomes a criminal offender

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Profiling is a self-fulfilling prophecy

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foreign-born youth had lower rates of so-called “delinquent behaviour” than Canadian-born youth

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white men are more likely to be sex offenders and drug dealers, while Black youth may be over-represented in youth gang membership (despite white youth still being the large majority of gang members)

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massive “known to police” database of the citizenry, which is not subject to outside oversight or any regulation on the purging of information

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Some data appears to suggest that every Black man has been documented in certain neighbourhoods

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The Montréal police’s focus on the largely fabricated street gang crisis served as a justification for a massive spike in street checks

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young people who are just learning how society functions were found to experience the most harms from racial profiling, harms that often last long into their adulthood

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Over-surveillance creates for Black subjects a reality in which merely existing is treated as suspect. This reality is wholly unimaginable to white citizens, who are free from "the feeling of dread" that is inflicted by profiling

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criminalization of drugs was related not to the pharmacological or social harms engendered by drugs, but was a result of anti-Black and anti- Chinese

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The War on Drugs declared in the 1980s had political and social utility welfare amid the substantive rollback of state supports undertaken by Brian Mulroney

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the anti-crime focus of the last several decades has been, in part, a reactionary response to racial and social justice movements

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burning of the computer labs

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state officials and civil society did not respond to social unrest with state policies aimed at combating racial and gendered inequalities. The conservative push toward “crime prevention” came as a response

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state investment in the punitive aspect of combating drug crime vastly outweighed the state investment in supporting drug users

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The buying and selling of drugs is a consensual transaction. It is a crime that must be proactively sought out by police, not a violent emergency requiring heavy intervention. Still, the policing of even low-level marijuana trafficking is highly militaristic

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intensified focus on drug policing comes not from any community or socially determined need, but from the police or higher political powers

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police do not, contrary to their claims, “go where the crime goes.” Drug use, as well as the sale of drugs, is in fact more common in white communities

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it is drug prohibition, not drugs, that has contributed to an enormous loss of life and lack of safety

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People suffering from addiction who have access to financial and familial support, as well as timely treatment, are far less likely to be homeless and destitute

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The ineffectiveness of drug prohibition is now widely documented. Yet, the state has long been aware of this and has consistently ignored scientific evidence

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It is malign negligence, or worse, that enormous amounts of public money continue to be invested in law enforcement, jails and prisons, rather than invested in communities, education, treatment and health services

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Black populations face a rate of violence by police that is more than five times that of the white population, and were subject to rampant and frequent abuse with little to no access to recourse

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out of nearly 320 complaints in the year 2013, only four officers were charged

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Out of nearly five hundred investigations by outside police forces since 1999, only six charges have been levelled at officers

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fifteen out of the twenty-two members of the BEI are former police employees and the supervisor of investigations, Patrice Abel, is a former investigator employed by the SQ

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It is impossible to know how many more Black people have been killed at the hands of the police across Canada: the information is not released by police, their oversight unions (if they exist) or at the federal level.

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discrimination continues all the way up the courts. Black-white disparities can be found in pre-trial detention and release conditions, including bail and sentencing

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In Ontario in 1994, the rate of pre-trial detention for Black people charged with trafficking and importing drugs was twenty-seven times higher than for whites. For drug possession, it was fifteen times higher

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criminal justice system perpetuates, rather than challenges, racial and gendered stratification

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jails and prisons are increasingly populated with those who have been deemed disposable

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Canadian prisons are both “slavery’s afterlife” and “the new residential schools”

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people who go to jail even for short periods of time often lose their housing and jobs, becoming homeless and destitute

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prison is a site of violence, not one of healing

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Caging “undesirables” does not actually create a safer or more peaceful society. In fact, in many cases it makes this goal more difficult to attain by exacerbating, racial rather inequalities than at directly the root addressing, of much of the social, what is economic called and “criminal behaviour.”

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it costs $108,376 per year to house a man in prison and nearly twice that for a female inmate, while funding for reintegration and release programs continues to be cut

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Prisons allow society to be relieved of “the responsibility of thinking about the real issues

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legitimacy of the Canadian state to incarcerate Indigenous peoples at all has been called into question

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DESTROYING BLACK FAMILIES

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